Deeplinks Blog posts about WIPO

The UN's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has just finished another round of deliberations on a new treaty. Although the draft treaty is nominally about Broadcasters' rights, most of the discussion focused on proposals to create new rights over Internet transmissions: the US's proposal to extend the treaty to "webcasting", and the European Union's pitch for "simulcasting" rights, covering retransmission of broadcasts and cablecasts over the Internet.

Today, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the UN's copyright/patent/trademark body, hosted a "Information Meeting on Educational Content and Copyright in the Digital Age" -- a meeting where representatives of libraries, Creative Commons, publishers, and science organizations vied to convince representatives from WIPO's 182 member national governments about the need for laws that balance the rights of creators and educational users of copyrighted works. Representatives from the governments of Chile and Canada gave inspirational presentations about the education-friendly copyright exception proposals currently being considered in their national legislatures.

Geneva - Our latest trip to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) ended last week, and we registered victories on all three of the issues that we've been following. First, the Development Agenda -- which looks at WIPO's impact on developing nations -- will continue to be a central part of the organization's work in 2006. Even as developed countries like the U.S., Japan, and most European states tried to shunt these proceedings into a committee that hadn't met for two years, developing countries from around the globe fought to keep their future on the front burner. A compromise was reached, and the Development Agenda will proceed in a provisional body specifically tasked with producing concrete recommendations for next year's General Assembly Meeting.

The Development Agenda is the most contentious issue WIPO has ever considered. So it's pretty surprising to hear the Chair describe a "wide majority, a significant majority" of opinion on just about anything. But that's what he said about the push to keep the agenda at the center of WIPO's work. While the vast majority of countries want to continue tackling the DA in a high-level meeting process known as the IIM, holdouts like the United States and Japan are still pushing to bury discussions in a nebulous committee that hasn't met for years. We won't know the results of this jockeying until Monday or Tuesday, but we'll report here as soon as we do.

EFF returned to Geneva this week for the WIPO General Assembly, a two-week marathon meeting where last year's progress is reviewed and future plans are hatched laid. While there are dozens of items on the agenda, we're tracking two very closely: the future of WIPO's work vis-a-vis the developing world (a.k.a. the Development Agenda) and a proposal to turn broadcasters into a new class of copyright holders (a.k.a. the WIPO Broadcasting Treaty). Both are currently moving in the right direction.